The UpTake: One way to increase your margins is to cut costs. But that only serves your customers' needs for so long. Eventually, value must be created too, or the whole enterprise comes tumbling down.

Bringing the product to market

You and your business need to completely understand its entire supply chain, from production to delivery to service, before embarking on an initiative.This is why it is so important to leverage and build on existing business practices. Market experience can guide you, and make it possible to address the market with your new product or service quickly without sacrificing quality or introducing unnecessary friction into the process.

Some friction will arise—it always does. Fortunately, a disciplined focus based upon institutional experience can minimize risk and keep you ahead of potential problems. When you leverage your existing business model, you can apply the lessons you've learned in the past to your new venture. If it's entirely uncharted territory, try to learn from the mistakes and successes of the most relevant businesses.That is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to avoid foreseeable mistakes and turn those lessons learned into success.

Identifying core competencies to drive product or service conceptualization is the first step. The next step is identifying potential challenges in the design, production, and distribution stages in advance of constructing the business model and go to market plan.

The new economic environment has made margins thinner, competition stronger, and profitability more difficult—but by leveraging your existing intellectual capital, you can identify new opportunities, create value, and bring new products to new niche markets faster and more successfully.

Geoffrey Rochwarger is chairman and chief executive officer of IDT Energy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of publicly traded Genie Energy Ltd (NYSE:GNE). In addition, he serves as vice chairman of Genie Energy Ltd.He launched IDT Energy in November 2004 while serving as president of IDT Capital, a division of IDT Corporation (NYSE: IDT) that he founded to incubate new business initiatives.

Comments

If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.